Pre-diploma Seminar in Regional Ethnology, Anthropology and Folkloristics

When a student registers to the third year, he or she selects pre-diploma seminar. In its frame he or she will work under the guidance of selected mentor with whom he or she will at the end defend the diploma work. In the first semester the student prepares the disposition of the diploma thesis, while in the second semester he or she presents it, discusses about it and, if necessary, supplements it within the pre-diploma seminar.
Pre-diploma seminar is organized as straightforward multi-directed exchange of knowledge and information between its participants and leaders (discussions about the material students read, searching for the sources and literature, methodological instructions, skills of oral presentation of knowledge). The seminar relates to the following established fields in the study program of ethnology and cultural anthropology: ethnology of Slovenia, ethnology of Europe and ethnology of non-European countries (Africa, Asia, America and Oceania and Australia), folkloristics.
Students get acquainted with the research on selected topics related to specific regions (especially Slovenia, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe or Slavic countries, the Balkans, various areas and cultures in Asia, Latin America, (North) Africa). They also learn about the research in the field of narrative folkloristics. Key ethnological and anthropological research on a certain region is in the foreground of the seminar, as well as it is to learn about the contemporary phenomena that characterize this region (for example neocolonialism, mobility, migration, nomadism, developmental programs, constructions of the Balkans as the Other). Students also get acquainted with the diversity of the practices, concepts and forms of specific phenomena (such as kinship, family, marriage and inheritance systems) and at the same time with the basic conceptual tools for their analysis. They acquire knowledge about different types and usages of ethnological sources which originate in more or less distant past or are emerging today, as well as they learn about the variety and specificities of regional cultures and ways of life.

Navaro-Yashin Yael: The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. Durham in London: Duke University Press, 2012. COBISS.SI-ID – 88043523

Each year separately those who lead the seminar prepare the list of literature - individually for each student and according to his or her chosen topic of the diploma work.